I also doubt that most of the 'protected designs' could actually be CR. If they are in fact CR then somebody should challenge it.
100,000s of landscape painters paint trees using certain techniques. Have you ever heard of a copyrighted landscape picture?
Of course, everybody puts his/her own stamp, feel and artistic expression into the painted images.
Same with quilting.
Whoever sews simple geometric forms into quilts without duplicating a commercial design stitch by stitch, color by color should be perfectly safe.
If I wanted to sell a pattern that uses e.g. tesselated stars in a gradated color scheme I would be perfectly safe to do so even if this design is shown e. g. in the quilters cache where many old-fashioned designs are published with the remark "This is an original design ..... "
My foot! Most of their designs are all but original designs (It's OK, their site is marvelous.) It has been done for many decades by many thousand quilters. These socalled CR warnings are unenforcible, not at the least because the designs have no unique or new elements.
Same as Michelangelo painting angels. Everybody copied his angels to everybody's delight.